Category Archives: Customer-Obsessed Culture

For businesses everywhere, this is becoming an increasingly relevant question.

Not long ago most business could just ignore Amazon and say to themselves that’s fine for them in retail they are not operating in our industry.

Well, times are changing, and Amazon is competing in not only retail but consumer electronics, entertainment, enterprise cloud services and is eyeing opportunities in healthcare and payments.

The question for all businesses to ask themselves is how would we respond if Amazon entered my marketplace?

Well, one company did not have to wonder for too long, in fact, they have been competing with them for the past 10 plus years. With the rise of Amazon, many analysts predicted the demise of Best Buy, the US brick and mortar retailer.

So how to Best Buy fight back? They applied the same approach as Amazon – customer obsession.

In fact, under the new CEO, Hubert Joly, they undertook a transformation from a transactional retailer focused on store traffic and closing sales to one focused on building customer relationships for life.

Where does a customer-obsessed transformation start?

It begins with your customers and employees when a business is under attack as Best Buy was around 2009, a new vision and purpose for the business’s future needs to be articulated.

Joly launched a turnaround plan called “Renew Blue” in 2012 that was designed to address all critical stakeholders in the business beginning with customers.

To gain insights on what was happening at the frontlines, Joly spent a week working in a store and talking with employees. They told him the website sucked, it was slow and difficult to navigate, and the employee discount had been reduced recently by previous management. They also described how customers were “showrooming” coming in to see products then buy them somewhere else online.

Joly began with some quick wins, restoring the employee discount and taking price off the table by guaranteeing to match online prices.

This showed he was listening and more importantly acting on feedback, a critical trait for a customer-obsessed leader.

He then focused on customer experience, redoing the website, investing in search and matching Amazon on free fast shipping.

By focusing on their unique strengths, the in-store personal experience, they have been able to focus and start winning again.

Joly shifted the employee mindset by instilling a new purpose. In his words “we’re not in the business of selling products or doing transactions, we have our purpose, which is to enrich lives with the help of technology.”

“We don’t see ourselves as a bricks-and-mortar retailer. We are company obsessed about the customer and in serving them in a way that truly solves their unique problems.”

What does this mean in practice?

For Best Buy that means introducing new service offerings such as the “in-home Advisor” which involves best buy employees going to people’s homes for free and providing expert advice on how to better select, buy and install technology to enhance their lives.

A second example is “Total tech support” which involved Best buy taking ownership of any technical problem in the home and fixing it, all for $200 a year.

The third example of their innovation is a focus on aging seniors with an emphasis on helping them stay in their homes independently for longer. Through the smart deployment of technology they can detect if something is wrong and people need help, they can then intervene to make sure people get the help they need.

Customer-obsessed Leadership

Customer-obsessed leaders don’t just say they are focused on customers they act on it and make decisions with a customer lens every day.

A great example is Best Buy’s relationship with Amazon, although fierce competitors on many fronts, they also see opportunities to collaborate and work together because it is the right thing for their customers.

“A lot of other retailers have been reluctant to sell their products. The reason we’ve sold their products is because we’re customer-driven.” says Joly.

In fact, recently Amazon chose to launch its Fire TV Smart TVs exclusively through Best Buy.

“Every management meeting we have, we don’t start with the financial results. We start with people. Then we talk about the customers, and last we talk about the financial results”

“I don’t believe that the purpose of a company is to make money. It’s an imperative. It’s a necessity. But it’s not the purpose”

Hubert Joly

The turnaround strategy with its reinvigorated purpose and customer obsession around enriching people’s lives through technology are paying off. The ship has turned, and the future looks bright for this retailer once thought to be following Circuit City into bankruptcy.

How can you instill a customer-obsessed culture in your business? It starts by understanding your current culture and charting a path based on purpose, people and delivering great customer experiences.

If you want to be one of the best at creating a consistently great customer
experience you have to be obsessive about it. Think professional athletes, think
sustainable weight loss, think the most customer-centric companies in the world
like Amazon.

Too many companies today have their weaknesses in their customer culture
exposed – some with devastating effects for their customers, employees, and
shareholders. Consider what’s happened in the banking sector, the retail sector, and
the telecommunications industry.

The culture of companies towards customers is now exposed for what it is – both to
their customers and to non-customers. Customer reviews, unwanted publicity for
failures of service delivery as well as visual cues from its website and physical
channels now expose a company’s customer culture – or lack of it.

This can’t be fixed using band-aids. A customer-centric culture is not a bolt-on. It has
to be built-in. If your company needs to build-in a strong customer culture you will
have to be obsessive about it – just like professional athletes, sports teams, and the
world’s most successful companies.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been obsessive about customers, since its
inception just over 20 years ago. He has made sure that everyone working at
Amazon is also obsessive about customers.

This means being obsessive about getting and acting on customer insights, giving
permission (empowerment) to employees to do what’s right for the customer,
working in collaborative teams to provide greater value for customers and aligning
everyone in your business to deliver a customer-centered strategy.

This is not some nice intangible idea anymore, we have been obsessed with developing a proven methodology with measurement and best practices that any company can use.

If you really want your organization to be customer-obsessed, talk to us we know the way!

Creating a customer-obsessed culture requires strong leadership and one of the very best exponents of the practice is Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

Even though Amazon now employs more than half a million employees and serves more than 300 million customers, Jeff Bezos personally reads every customer complaint email sent to him. While he does not respond to them personally, he is immersed in them as a way to stay in touch with the reality of what is going on in the business.

We call this, customer immersion, and it is one of the most important activities any CEO can engage in.

So how does he manage the wide range of customer complaints/feedback he receives directly?

He is known to forward the email directly to the leader accountable for that area with a simple “question mark”. The question mark is his short-hand for can you look into this? why is this happening?

Leaders know they are then on the hook to drill into the issue and find out what is happening and resolve it in a systemic manner, ie so it does not occur again!

And this is the crux of what makes a customer-obsessed culture different, leadership takes this seriously and follows through on making the changes necessary so that the source of the complaint is eliminated…. this simply does not happen in most organizations.

This approach gives Bezos a frontline insight into what customers think and experience. It is a huge leadership advantage as he can maintain a pulse on what is actually going on across Amazon’s massive and complex business.

“The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”

For 10 years MarketCulture has helped leaders around the world understand how to engage employees in building a customer-obsessed culture. The MRI Assessment provides valuable feedback to leaders they can act on to enable employees to deliver great customer experiences.

MarketCulture has proven scientifically that a stronger customer culture will drive increased business performance through retention of customers and increased advocacy.Contact us now to find out how we can help your company become customer obsessed.

It’s great to see more and more senior leaders recognizing the need to go deeper and look at organizational culture. Whilst it can be more difficult work, it is also longer lasting and more sustainable if leaders put the effort in to change the cultural emphasis towards making customer’s lives better.

So how are CMOs and other leaders looking to address culture?

One of the best examples comes from Rachael Powell, the Chief Customer and People Officer for Xero, they are taking an inside-out approach by focusing on their people and how they impact the customer’s experience.

Xero has recognized the intimate connection between how employees are treated and how they, in turn, treat customers:

“It really is about starting with our own people first who are the biggest ambassadors for our brand, winning their hearts and minds, then resonating that out to our channel, which is bookkeepers and accountants, and ultimately the end customer sitting at the end of the spectrum,” she said. “If we achieve this, we go from having 2000 ambassadors, our people, to having hundreds of thousands of ambassadors globally.”

They also appear to have a strategy for shaping their culture over time with 2 of 6 pillars sitting with Rachael: “great people and teams, and love and protect our customers”

It will be interesting to follow the Xero journey as they continue to grow!

Over the past 10 years, MarketCulture has researched 100’s of companies including Google, Virgin, Amazon, and Apple to find out what they do differently when delivering great customer experiences.

Could you create change if you knew the strengths and weaknesses of your company compared to these companies?

I was speaking recently with Rashid Velemeev, CEO of Sindbad Travel, one of Russia’s biggest online travel booking agencies based in St Petersburg. We were discussing customer-centric leaders and he mentioned that he believed an important characteristic is that they feel internal pain.

They can’t accept the way things are and they must change it to relieve their pain. It may be an experience of very poor service or of a product that does not work properly or an experience with people in a company who just don’t care. It creates a burning desire to do something about it.

When we think about this we realize that many businesses are started today because the founder has had a very poor customer experience and feels compelled to fill the gap created in the marketplace. It becomes a passion to make things right and if implemented well becomes a very good business.

Are you a leader that feels pain because things are not done right in your business to consistently deliver customer satisfaction? Do you feel the pain personally with each customer complaint? If so you can relieve that pain by implementing some of the ideas in our book: The Customer Culture Imperative.

Can you imagine a business where everyone connects with its true purpose and gives the very best of himself or herself every day to deliver on that purpose?

What an awesome place that would be to work! And wouldn’t you love to be their customer!

Unfortunately, there are only a few organizations like this in the world today. However, the good news is that many more companies are actually aspiring to be that way.

I don’t care what business you are in; you must foster a new operating model to be successful in today’s business environment.

What makes it different?

The old school autocratic, all-knowing CEO is out, the age of talented teams focused on customers is here.

We call this customer culture, an environment where teams of people work together to deliver unique, valuable customer experiences.

The evidence for the need to create this type of culture is everywhere, all around us.

Nowhere to hide.

Companies can no longer brush poor customer experiences under the carpet, there is a large and vocal customer constituency that will voice their opinions and these will influence whether or not others are interested in your products and services.

Purpose matters.

The days of people turning up for work for a paycheck then turning off is gone. If you spend more than half of your living hours working it had better be for more than just a paycheck.

More than ever before younger workers are looking for meaning in their work, why am I doing this? Where is the meaning?

Customers want to know why you do what you do.

Simon Sinek has recognized that consumers today care about why you do what you do as much as what your offer. If you are just in business to make money for shareholders, I think you will find it a tough environment to compete in. Do something to improve my life, the life of our community, the world or the environment…

Employee Engagement is not enough.

While employee engagement is important, it is simply not enough.

For organizations to succeed they need engaged employees that are directing that energy and passion towards solving problems for their customers.

In fact, we have found engaged employees are the result of good leadership (fair consistent, transparent, inspirational), a strong culture and people doing meaningful work for their customers.

You can’t make someone engaged in their work but you can create the environment (culture) where it is much more likely to happen.

Your call to action:

For 10 years MarketCulture has helped leaders around the world understand how to engage employees in building a customer-obsessed culture. The MRI Assessment provides valuable feedback to leaders that they can act on to enable employees to deliver great customer experiences.

MarketCulture has proven scientifically that a stronger customer culture will drive increased business performance through retention of customers and increased advocacy.

Contact us now to find out how we can help your company become customer obsessed.

Luke Jecks, the Former CEO of Naked Wines, founded and led an online wine business that operates in the US, the UK, and Australia. The company connects wine lovers with boutique wineries and uses a subscription model where “angels” – consumers who pay a monthly subscription to help fund the winery’s next vintage – are able to order their favorite wines and pay for them from their subscriptions. It is a customer-funded wine business.

I asked Luke how this came about.

He replied: “The most important thing in the wine industry is that the only way this online business could work would be if we could have consumers that were “sticky” to the business. If we could get loyalty in perpetuity we would not have to be a business that is constantly out there chasing new sales. Instead what we could do is invest in loyalty in the consumer and if we did that we would have a sustainable business.”

“So we needed a model that did not trap consumers but made them want to stay. So the questions we had to answer were: How do you reinvent the wine club and its benefits with a subscription that had no cancellation fees, had no minimum period of membership, you could walk away at any time, and any money you put into the subscription you got back?”

“We found that a segment of wine consumers need to see a choice, a benefit, a feeling of being in control and where they feel they can connect with the values of the business. We felt that to keep customers in the long term we needed to make them feel proud – because they mattered and were part of the key wine choices being made and understood their role in making the business a success and the winemakers successful. Also proud because they feel they are doing good through the stories behind the winemakers that can’t happen without them”.

I asked Luke how this relates to customer-centricity. He said: “To me, you must have an “attract” model and not a “trap” model. It is a model where the customer plays a vital part in the success. So it is important for us to measure the customer lifetime value – that is how long they stay with us and how much they spend. That is much more important than today’s transaction. We believe that if we can get loyalty, we will get sales. We tested this by sending “high engagement” emails to half our consumers and “buy” emails to the other half. It turned out that the “engagement” emails created loyalty and those consumers bought more. We asked our consumers to rate their happiness with us. We found that people who rated us 5 stars (90%-100%) had much bigger lifetime value. So we set about investing to get 90%+ ratings by putting more people in the business, paying our staff more, investing in career programs for our staff and empowering them to empower our customers.

I asked Luke what has been the result. He said:

“From a standing start 5 years ago Naked Wine now has more than 100,000 angels. But more important than this number is the high level of loyalty. This has created a growing, profitable and sustainable business.”

A truly customer obsessed business has loyal customers that buy from you because they want to – and stay with you because they see that you care and that they are important. It is a business, like Naked Wines, that invests in and empowers its people to fully engage with their customers to create great customer experiences. This translates into increasing customer lifetime value. Sustainable profit and growth follow.